If Hollywood is any indication, 2001 was
the year of the single mom. Actors including Camryn Manheim, Calista
Flockhart, and Jodie Foster, by adoption or by birth, placed single
motherhood in the national spotlight, gracing the covers of Us
and People magazine. And the character Rachel from the
hit television series Friends, upon finding herself unexpectantly
pregnant, decided to have her baby alone; it's the child she wants,
not necessarily the husband. Given the public acceptance of these
notable single mothers by choice, it would seem that this version
of the new millennium family has found a suitable home in the
United States. Yet one only needs to consider insurance policies,
which frequently state that reproductive technologies will only
be covered if a woman uses her own husband's sperm, to see that
Manheim, Flockhart, and Foster provide the exceptions rather than
the rule. In fact, their high-profile acts of procreation might
be understood as significant threats to the dominant reproductive
order, threats that other social, medical, and governmental institutions
work hard to police. Narrative, of course, is one such institution.

In a culture fraught with anxiety about the
so-called decline of the family, it is not surprising that numerous
texts, both popular and academic, take reproduction as central
subject. E. Ann Kaplan closes her book on motherhood by reflecting
on texts as diverse as advertisements for Mother's Day gifts and
the film Look Who's Talking in order to characterize the
kinds of anxieties surrounding gender and reproductive technology
at work in contemporary culture. In Reproductions of Reproduction,
Judith Roof furthers this argument by suggesting that fears about
large scale changes in the symbolic order—including modes of
production, assisted reproduction, and the role of the paternal—can
be seen, among other places, in representations of reproduction.
As these analyses make clear, representations of mothers, fathers,
and families do a great deal of ideological work. They can, as
Dan Quayle has done, depict single mothers as selfish homewreckers,
or as Marie Claire has done, everyday heroes. Either way,
such representations have little to do with the practical realities
of single-parent families in the United States. While mother-headed
families range from the stereotypical welfare mom attacked by
Quayle to the divorced mother in midwestern suburbia to the upper-class
"Murphy Brown mom," media coverage and popular representations
focus heavily on the new single mother, what Jane Mattes has termed
the "single mother by choice" or SMC. Such focus intimates
that America's comfort with single maternity is not only limited
but depends on ignoring the economic realities that underpin the
family values controversy. As Quayle's criticism of Murphy Brown
made clear, the upper class white woman stood in for the welfare
mothers he was really concerned about.

In what follows, I want to consider several
prominent characterizations of single mothers by choice (SMCs),
characterizations that take the point of view of the single mother
herself. Such narratives are important because they provide an "insider's"
look at the SMC phenomenon and add to an ongoing cultural dialogue
about the changing nature of the American family. If the focus on
well-to-do white women appears to obfuscate issues of race and class
so central to political rhetoric about single moms, it is striking
that even these positive, "vanilla" representations inevitably
end up validating the traditional nuclear, patriarchal family at
the expense of the alternatives they appear to endorse. Popular
representations of SMCs might kowtow to the changing nature of the
family, but their sentimentalized longing for heterosexual romance
and domestic bliss serves to undercut the choice involved in becoming
a single mother by resituating the threatened patriarch at the head
of the family. On the level of narrative structure, these images
reveal the interdependence of narrative and reproductive ends. Indeed,
our very structures of narrative make it impossible to envision
a true alternative to the family and therefore fail to represent—in
the political sense of the term—many American families.

Founded in 1981 by Jane Mattes, a psychotherapist
who found herself unexpectedly pregnant, Single Mothers by Choice
is now a national support group with local chapters in many states.
The term "Single Mother by Choice," or SMC, refers specifically
to those women, like Manheim and Foster, who made a decision to
pursue motherhood with the knowledge that they would be the child's
sole parent from the outset. Although SMCs share many concerns of
other single parents, their family dynamic is fundamentally distinct
from those women who were widowed or divorced because there isn't
a sense of loss or breakup as the origin. On the whole, SMCs tend
to be well-educated, financially secure heterosexual women in their
mid-thirties (Mattes 10-11). Coming from a variety of ethnic, religious,
and political backgrounds, members of SMC "represent a real
cross section of women in this country" (11). Yet, despite
the undeniable support that Mattes and her peers provide to SMCs,
the official story, as scripted in the book Single Mothers by
Choice, is a tale of hard luck and missed chances, rather than
realized dreams. Mattes encourages women who are contemplating single
motherhood to "grieve Plan A," the young girl's vision
of bridesmaids in flouncy dresses, a dashing young husband, and
an adorable baby asleep in a basinet. The fact that there is a "Plan
A" necessitates a "Plan B," in this case the choice
to raise a child alone. As the otherwise successful professional
woman hears her biological clock sounding an internal alarm, she
realizes that her last chance to have a child is as an SMC, whether
she adopts or turns to donor insemination. She's already lost her
chance at a husband, it seems, and if she doesn't act soon, she'll
lose the baby, too. In this vein, the "thinker," or prospective
SMC, becomes either a woman scorned or an undesirable careerwoman
who bemoans her loss of the feminine dream. "To be happy being
an SMC," Mattes advises, "you need to come to terms with
giving up your dream of parenting a child from the beginning with
a loving partner" (4-5). Intentional or not, Mattes' word choice
implies that the choice not to pursue Plan A is a loss worthy of
substantial grief, something that the SMC wanted and failed to attain.

This is, of course, a reductive look at Mattes'
groundbreaking book. For twenty years, Mattes has championed Single
Mothers by Choice in talk shows, magazine articles, and internet
lists. As a single mother herself, Mattes acknowledges the viability
of her own family dynamic. Still, the official rhetoric speaks loudly
and works hard to maintain the heterosexual nuclear family as not
only the norm, but also the desirable goal. Whether or not two-parent
families provide the ideal method of raising a child is not the
question; rather, even as the birth of the SMC organization legitimates
a particular family alternative, that alternative is, even within
Mattes' own words, less than ideal, a backup plan. Attempting to
clarify that SMCs are not "man-haters or, at the least, radical
feminists who [are] trying to overthrow the traditional American
family structure," Mattes asserts that "to the contrary,
we [are] trying to create families in the best way we could and
that most of us would have preferred to do so in the traditional
way with a loving partner" (17). In this way, Mattes' discussion
positions the SMC family as the secondary alternative rather than
the preferred choice. Considering the specter of heterosexual romance
that haunts Mattes' book, it is hardly surprising that popular depictions
of SMCs operate much the same.

In one such work of fiction, Laura Zigman's
novel Dating Big Bird (2000), the romance plot and the reproduction
plot conveniently unite despite the numerous obstacles that stand
in the protagonist's way. An exploration into one woman's quest
to become an SMC, Dating Big Bird is organized in three trimesters
during which the protagonist conceives, gestates, and gives birth
to her plan. The book ends happily, when Ellen achieves pregnancy
through donor insemination. Zigman's Ellen is, in many ways, the
SMC as characterized by Jane Mattes. She is a successful careerwoman
living in New York City with a strong desire to be a mother and
a romantic relationship that is going nowhere. Despite her charmed
professional life, as Ellen explains, she has nothing: "Just
a relationship with an older Big Bird (by twenty years), who was
complicated (divorced, depressed, despondent), difficult to explain
(we slept together but didn't sleep together)" (21). While
Prozac accounts in part for Malcolm's (Big Bird's) waning sex drive,
the loss of his son from leukemia and subsequent split from his
wife increases his reluctance for an intimate relationship with
Ellen, leaving her with no possibility of an "accidental"
pregnancy. The novel begins when Ellen runs into a high school acquaintance,
Amy, who pretends that her niece is her daughter. Suffering from
self-proclaimed "Familial Infant Envy Disorder," the two
women agree to spend nine months contemplating single motherhood
and grieving Plan A. In order to quell Amy's expressed reservations,
Ellen explains, "I'm not sure I want to do it alone or could
do it alone, either. I'm just saying we should start investigating
it. So when the time comes—when our gum-ball machines are on their
last eggs—we'll have a backup plan" (95). For both Ellen and
Amy, single motherhood clearly represents Plan B, "a backup
plan"; choosing to go it alone means "giving up the possibility,
the chance, the hope that it could all still happen in a natural
way, in a normal way; that [they] could fall in love with someone
who wasn't married or who wasn't frozen" (137). It means choosing
maternity instead of the love or romance that, in dominant narratives
of family planning (and dominant narratives of narrative), generally
precede procreation (137). While Ellen ultimately decides to pursue
donor insemination, Amy "settles" and becomes engaged
to a man who, while "not the most exciting person in the world,"
is "nice" and "wants to get married and have children"
(209).

Despite the breakup with Malcolm—which occurs
because she asks him to act as a known donor to help her conceive—Ellen's
story is, finally, a romance plot. She falls in love with the idea
of motherhood the moment she holds her newborn niece, she gets to
know her intended when she babysits "The Pickle," and
she commits at the birth of her nephew. And, despite her struggle
to grieve Plan A, Ellen's choice of single motherhood offers a fairy
tale end. While many prospective SMCs struggle with infertility,
a natural consequence of aging, this heroine conceives on the first
try. While many real-life SMCs worry about the costs of conceiving,
let alone raising, a child alone, Ellen has recently entered a business
venture with Tiffany and Company that has earned an extraordinary
amount of money, allowing her to leave her day job and take a carefree
maternity leave. Her "mammo" necklace, designed for her
boss's baby shower, represents the power of the modern mother; sold
at $15,000 each, they provide the capital—literal and cultural—for
her family's creation:

I felt it in my bones, and in every cell of my body, and to the
very core of my being, and in the flash of an instant—in a flash
of vision and insight and time fast-forwarding itself inside my
eyes—I saw that I could be alone like that forever, and I knew,
at that moment, that I could not bear it.

And that I did not have to bear it. I could have my own child—my
own Pickle, my own Monkey. I could be somebody's mammo. Finally
I knew what I wanted to do. (219)

And, if conception seems the logical end to
Ellen's maternal romance, sex provides the end to the romance plot
that stood in the way of maternity. Ironically, Ellen's decision
to become an SMC coincides with her boyfriend's renewed interest;
in fact, they consummate their relationship during the protagonist's
first trimester, in the final lines of the book.

This ending, heterosexual union and the promise
of reproduction, ensures that Dating Big Bird follows a traditional
narrative paradigm and, ultimately, ideology as well. As Judith
Roof explains in her award-winning book Come As You Are,
even when romance is not the subject of a story, narrative is ineluctably
inflected with heterosexual ideology, as heterosexual coupling provides
a metaphorical, if not literal, model for the traditional narrative
arc. Indeed, both structuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of narrative
ultimately "comprehend narrative's coming together as a species
of combination that follows a more or less heterological model of
conjoinder" (58). Following this narrative and ideological
pattern, the end of the story is union and reproduction, in the
form of knowledge, prosperity, and, most literally, propagation.
Given the inextricability of heterosexual desire and patterns of
narrative, Roof aptly uses the term "heteronarrative"
to characterize this traditional narrative arc. And if narrative
is already governed by a sexual metaphor, stories of reproduction
are inescapably—and doubly—hetero. Narrative's heterosexual drive
ensures that stories of the family are stories of romance. Thus,
while Dating Big Bird initially uses the failure of the romance
plot in order to instigate the protagonist's desire to pursue single
pregnancy, the fairy tale ending, when the heroine gets her man
as well as her baby, assures that the larger narrative arc remains
hetero. More strikingly, within the logic of this story, becoming
an SMC is the protagonist's ticket to snagging a mate, as her partner's
fears about sex are tied to his anxieties about family. He's already
had and lost a traditional family, and he isn't about to start the
cycle over. In this way, even after the heroine grieves Plan A and
pursues Plan B, she gets her fantasy end. And Zigman's novel, even
as it creates a positive portrait of the SMC—a take-charge woman
of the nineties who achieves what she wants both personally and
professionally—ultimately recontains the threat that the SMC poses
to the dominant reproductive order by resituating Ellen in the context
of a heterosexual relationship. Even if her baby was conceived using
untraditional methods, the child will no doubt grow up with a familiar
family dynamic, two parents joined in a plot that promises romance
and reproduction. If, as Roof contends, the possibility of subversion
lies in narrative's middle, the end works hard to police any illicit
ideologies and acts (xxxiv). While narrative is always inflected
with ideology, popular literature, which depicts what E. Ann Kaplan
calls "generalized fantasies," provides a striking look
into the fears and desires of the American public (182). In its
heterosexual ending, then, Dating Big Bird communicates profound
anxiety about female sexuality and reproduction that take place
outside the confines of the normative family unit. The social and
economic freedoms that allow Ellen to become an SMC are ultimately
policed by the romance plot, and the threat that Ellen poses is
recontained within a dominant structure of both narrative and family.

Whatever the specific reasons for Zigman's
choice—personal taste, aesthetic style, and marketing departments
come to mind—the conclusion to Dating Big Bird sends a powerful
message that even those individuals who support the idea of single
motherhood do so with an understanding that if it can be avoided,
it should be, just as Mattes relegates her own family structure
to the grievable space of Plan B. My point here is not whether,
for some women and children, the SMC-headed family might legitimately
provide Plan A; rather, despite recent work in sociology and psychology
that reminds us, among other things, that the American family was
never the Leave it to Beaver ideal and that children raised
in so-called alternative families do as well in school as their
peers, our cultural imaginary does not envision the SMC family as
anything other than second best. In this way, representations of
the family do not represent the issues and needs of all American
families. While the single-mother household struggles to overcome
the stigma attached to "unwed mothers" and "illegitimate
children," popular television and film does valorize other
kinds of "alternative" family dynamics, suggesting that
the anxiety surrounding the SMC has much more to do with prevailing
attitudes about gender than it does a legitimate concern about the
welfare of children.

While the SMC family, until very recently,
wasn't depicted at all in popular texts, other types of alternative
families have thrived on screen since the late eighties, when shows
including My Two Dads and Full House created male-headed
family structures. Part of the backlash famously characterized by
Susan Faludi, these father-focused dramas, according to Kaplan,
help to alleviate cultural anxiety surrounding the professional
woman who chooses career over family; although the absentee mothers
in these two comedies are dead, they stand in metonymically for
contemporary women more generally. Here, the new-age sensitive man
steps in to relieve the burden created by women who abandon their
families and, with help from relatives and buddies, create loving,
functional homes. As Kaplan explains, "Perhaps indicating a
cultural reaction to the prior decade when women's liberation had
been a main theme, films and TV programs became obsessed with fantasies
of the mother abdicating her role as wife and mother to pursue her
own ends, leaving the father to the domestic terrain that he found
increasingly rewarding" (184). Likewise, Roof's analysis of
pregnant fathers, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger in the popular film
Junior, argues that these representations serve to reclaim
the paternal function, lost due to technological advances and social
change. According to Roof,

The Arnold figure's overcompensatory muscles are situated at
the nexus of interlocking American anxieties about control (the
illusion of being able to shape culture), potency, masculinity,
and paternity threatened by female independence, reproductive
freedom, overgrown technology, and a loss of world prestige.
These anxieties are refocused specifically in issues of paternity,
whose loss is seen as causing cultural decay and whose revivification
is imagined to be cultural salvation in the late 1980s and 1990s.
(Reproductions 58-59)

Single mothers, of course, yield a substantial
threat to the weakening patriarchy, particularly as donor insemination
makes it possible for the male role in reproduction to be reduced
to a single cell from a frozen vial, and the male role in the household
virtually eliminated. The rhetoric of Mattes' Single Mothers
by Choice and the narrative trajectory of Zigman's Dating
Big Bird reveal the extent to which these paternal anxieties
subtend both cultural production and reproductive choices. Under
this patriarchal pressure, many women, such as Ellen, who have reproductive
freedom and the economic means to use it, work hard to battle the
internalized ideology that transforms maternal desire into a less
than desirable family narrative.

Other representations of single mothers convey
similar concerns. A striking example is the short-lived series Oh
Baby (1998-2000), which aired on Lifetime (self-proclaimed "television
for women"). This series revolves around a professional woman,
Tracy, who, at the prodding of a friend, decides to pursue donor
insemination as means of conception. Like Dating Big Bird,
Oh Baby provides the first-person perspective of Tracy in
monologues that frame the plot of each episode and instruct the
viewer as to what she should learn from the story. Although Oh
Baby, created by single mother Susan Beavers, offers a more
positive, complex look at the life of the SMC and new family structures
than Dating Big Bird, the series emphasizes heterosexual
romance almost to a fault, highlighting how difficult it is to disimbricate
narratives of family from stories of (hetero)sexuality. In the episode
that features the birth, for example, Tracy reunites with her ex-boyfriend
and receives a marriage proposal from another former suitor, while
her friend Charlotte becomes engaged to her obstetrician, all in
the cozy environment of the birthing suite. Thus, even as single
motherhood provides the frame for the series, discussion of dating
and romance takes up much of its screen time—undoubtedly holding
viewer interest while failing to represent the needs of many single
moms. One of the show's most prominent subplots involves how Tracy
will negotiate partnership with the demands of single pregnancy
and maternity. Only ten minutes after her insemination, she repeatedly
reminds her television audience, she met Rick, the love of her life.
How will she tell him she's pregnant and when? What role will he
play in her pregnancy and her baby's life? These questions underwrite
the larger narrative arcs, ultimately threatening to make Tracy
something other than a single mother by choice. At one point, she
and Rick actually cohabitate and attempt to raise the infant Danny
together; although the arrangement doesn't work out, the series
holds open the possibility that Tracy will have her life-partner
and her child, just not in the traditionally prescribed order: "I
still may get married one day," she assures her mother, who
complains that Tracy jilted her out of a wedding. Moments such as
this one serve to alleviate prevalent anxiety about single mothers
by choice, reassuring the Lifetime audience that Tracy is, despite
her choice to be a single mom, still a good, heterosexual woman
who wants to endorse the traditional, male-headed family structure.

This emphasis on romance doesn't mean that
Tracy thinks of her decision as "Plan B," however. In
fact, Oh Baby makes every attempt to convey the benefits
of single motherhood as well as to legitimate alternative family
structures. "Families, father figures," Tracy wraps up
an episode, "it's all changing. And I think the problem we're
having is that we keep trying to mold them back into what they once
were. The family unit isn't that clear anymore." Tracy's monologue
reminds us, as does the title of Stephanie Coontz's influential
work The Way We Really Are, that the reality of the American
family is quite distinct from the image of the family that continues
to prosper in popular representations. Oh Baby thus tries
hard to take single motherhood on its own terms, as a viable means
of valuing the family. Indeed, when Tracy finally decides to tell
her colleagues about her pregnancy, she's "proud" to say
she was artificially inseminated. Tracy's openness communicates
a positive message about SMC-headed families and makes it clear
that, even though she wants to find a mate, her first priority is
to have a child. Not only is Tracy's method of family planning normalized
within the context of the series, it is revered by other women in
her new mothers' group; they make her "queen" because
she has managed to reproduce without the burdens they associate
with marriage and heterosexual partnership. Their husbands, they
claim, make parenting more difficult, just as Tracy comes to realize
that one of the benefits of single motherhood is that she doesn't
need to negotiate all childcare decisions with a partner. Her son
is her son.

Yet despite its positive portrayal of the new
single mother by choice, Oh Baby ineluctably shows that contemporary
America isn't designed for single motherhood, a fact underscored
by the series' short run on a cable network, much less on primetime
broadcast television. After the birth of her child, Tracy's weekly
monologues spotlight her dilemmas with balancing career, motherhood,
dating, and friendships. When Tracy first goes back to work following
her maternity leave, she not only falls behind, she also falls asleep
at her desk. When she and Rick go out for coffee, she accidentally
leaves him at Starbucks. Such humorous moments depict the SMC without
any of the glamour of Hollywood moms; instead, she becomes the target
of ridicule from co-workers and television audience alike. During
one episode, in which Tracy brings the baby and her mother along
on a company trip to Hawaii, she accidentally brushes her teeth
with her son's teething medication, losing sensation in her mouth
and drooling uncontrollably at a cocktail party. As ridiculous as
this moment is, it suggests that corporate America isn't ready to
accommodate motherhood, let alone single motherhood, even as it
risks making good mothers look like bad employees. Later in this
same episode, stuck without a babysitter, Tracy sets Danny on the
floor behind the podium when she is giving her speech, the very
purpose for her trip. He begins to crawl for the first time, and
Tracy interrupts her presentation to watch and praise her son. Her
male boss snickers and scowls, while a female higher-up demands
that the baby's accomplishment be videotaped, explaining that she
wasn't around when her child learned to crawl. This scene dramatizes
one of the most overtly political moments of the series by pointing
out the very real gender politics of the business world, where women
like Tracy necessarily choose between being good mothers and being
good workers. If working women can afford to become single moms,
single mothers can't afford to lose their positions as valued employees.
And if the greatest obstacle faced by single-parent households is
economic, Oh Baby demonstrates that it would certainly be
a lot easier if Tracy only had a second income (or a full-time nanny).

So, while women's achievements in the workplace
have afforded them the financial independence necessary to even
contemplate single motherhood, Tracy's difficulties with everything
from daycare to dating suggest that we're not yet living in a culture
that makes being an SMC the viable option it is for many women.
Although Oh Baby undoubtedly complicates the fairytale of
Dating Big Bird by depicting the realistic challenges of
single motherhood, it also makes the SMC out to be a scatterbrain
who relies heavily on the help of her mother and best friend, whose
job and relationships suffer because she has chosen to raise a child
alone. Ultimately, then, Tracy's story enforces common assumptions
about single parent families even as it attempts to undercut them.
And, when considered in the context of Lifetime programming more
generally, Oh Baby inevitably makes the traditional family
structure seem simpler, if not more desirable, by comparison. Tracy's
parenting group might consider her "queen," but Lifetime,
with its line-up of Judith Krantz made-for-TV movies, ensures that
Tracy remains the exception rather than the rule. In this way, the
ambivalence of the series—which seems to vacillate between at best
extolling the virtues of the SMC and at worst condemning Tracy for
being ill-equipped to be the supermom she wants—might be understood
as an attempt to negotiate the demands of the television audience,
for whom SMChood holds the fascination of a tabloid scandal rather
than a realistic life choice.

For young women, one of the most highly visible
SMCs of the 2001-2002 television season is Rachel from the NBC comedy
Friends. Because of her notoriety, Rachel (played by Emmy
Award winning actress Jennifer Aniston) provides a cultural site
with incredible potential to either rescript or endorse dominant
understandings of single motherhood in the early twenty-first century.
Rachel's pregnancy, rather than a conscious choice, is merely another
twist in her increasingly complicated relationship with Ross, the
baby's father. Strikingly, while Rachel's pregnancy, revealed in
the season premiere, provides a major narrative arc, the realities
of maternity go almost unmentioned except as they relate to the
male friends. One could almost forget that Rachel is pregnant until
the episode that focuses on her second trimester libido, a biological
drive that threatens to send her into the arms of her friend and
roommate Joey; the relative invisibility of Rachel's pregnancy contrasts
sharply with the overwhelmingly present body of Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow),
who, earlier in the series, agreed to be a surrogate for her brother
and his wife, ultimately acting in service of the father-centered
nuclear family rather than standing in its way. Unlike Rachel's
pregnancy, which threatens to derail her journey for a mate, Phoebe's
surrogacy is rendered safe because it merely provides an alternative
means of achieving the traditional family—times three. The contrast
between these dynamics is underscored in Rachel's diatribe about
dating and motherhood. She bemoans the fact no one wants to date
a pregnant woman; in fact, she won't be able to date for "so
long." However much she wants her child, the baby clearly poses
an obstacle to Rachel's bachelorette lifestyle. Furthermore, Rachel's
intense longing for romantic evenings and sexual encounters underscores
that for her, single motherhood is clearly a Plan B, a card she
was dealt rather than a hand she wanted to play.

Despite Rachel's concerns that her romantic
life is over, her pregnancy, like Ellen's in Dating Big Bird,
creates new possibilities for romance. She moves in with Ross, who
laments the fact that he's missing out on all the pregnancy milestones,
such as the baby's first kick, while Joey pines for the loss of
the woman he only recently came to love. In fact, his daily involvement
in the pregnancy actually spawns Joey's desire; he dreams of being
in the delivery room for the birth, clearly taking the place of
the baby's biological father. In this way, Rachel's choice to be
a single mother is consistently undercut by the desires of her male
companions who try to fit Rachel and the baby into a traditional
family dynamic, overwhelming her life with male presence and control.
Rachel and Ross might not be married, but their child will undoubtedly
have two loving parents, if not three. As a whole, the narrative
arcs of the series ensure that Rachel's declaration that she doesn't
want a husband holds very little threat. To the contrary, one might
read the pregnancy arc as an attempt to restore Ross's position
as patriarch, lost early in the series when his son Ben was raised
by ex-wife Carol and her partner Susan. Comedic moments of struggle
over the baby's name, for example, serve to emasculate Ross when
Susan replaces him as the baby's second parent. Deprived of his
role as male head of the household and threatened by Carol's lesbianism,
Ross can finally regain his lost masculinity and create a family
with Rachel. Even if they don't marry, he clearly acts as the baby's
father and Rachel's partner over the course of her pregnancy. And
the baby ensures that Ross and Rachel's on-again, off-again relationship
reaches proper reproductive ends. Much like the end of Dating
Big Bird, Rachel's single motherhood seems to operate in the
service of, rather than in opposition to, heterosexual romance.
Considering the status of Friends as a consistently ranked
top-ten show, the image it creates of single mothers and families
provides a strong indication of a particular cultural mood. Ultimately,
the series intimates that mainstream viewers might be ready to consider
"alternative families" so long as they remain just that.

While images of mature single mothers have
flooded television screens and magazine covers, complicating stereotypes
of single mothers as young, immature, and lower-class, the stories
that we tell about SMCs and the stories put out by Single Mothers
by Choice demonstrate continued cultural anxiety about the changing
nature of the American family. Rather than depict the realistic
struggles of single moms in a variety of race and class contexts,
these sanitized representations of SMCs turn to traditional narrative
structures and ideologies. In contrast to father-headed families
and blended families, SMChood makes clear the real challenge to
heterosexual romance and traditional gender roles. In a culture
without the gendered separation of public and private spheres, in
which women do not need to rely on men for their financial well-being,
the ideological force of narrative works even harder to create a
cultural and psychological need for Plan A; much as the romance
narrative emerged with the rise of capitalism in order to make desirable
a gendered division of labor, the contemporary heteronarrative continues
to police changing economic realities. Economically and biologically,
heterosexual coupling no longer needs to be a woman's only choice
for maternity. Despite—or because of—these real social and technological
facts of life, Single Mothers by Choice holds a viable promise and
a significant cultural threat, even as Jane Mattes asserts that
the organization is not political. And while science fiction and
feminist utopian narratives might welcome such images as signs of
cultural change, our popular narratives provide an index of just
how far we still need to go.

The problem, ultimately, is that representations
of reproduction inevitably reproduce narrative's reproductive paradigm.
Until we can create narratives that operate under a non-heterosexual
metaphor, the stories that we tell about the family will continue
to reproduce, rather than challenge, dominant ideas about the family,
ensuring that single motherhood remains either the enviable outcome
of Hollywood wealth or the deplorable stereotype of the welfare
mom. At this point, the SMC's narrative still functions in the secondary
space of the perverse; and while becoming an SMC is Plan A for many
real women, popular representations, such as Oh Baby and
Dating Big Bird, work to ensure that choosing Plan B still
allows the possibility of Plan A, in narrative timing, if not in
hierarchy. In the end, the woman has her baby and her mate, and
the child, once considered "illegitimate," actually functions
to create, and ultimately legitimize, Plan A. As Roof reads Freud's
theory of the perverse, it functions as a structural necessity on
the way to the "proper" (read: heterosexual) end. What's
necessary, then, is a narrative model that allows us to take the
perverse, here the SMC, on her own terms, to give value to her vision
of reproduction instead of reproducing traditional narratives of
family values. Only in this way will narrative truly begin to represent
American families.

Notes

1. The April 23, 2001 issue of Us Weekly, for example, bears
the headline "The New Single Moms And How they Do It."
The magazine spotlights Camryn Manheim's "new life as a single
mother" shortly following the birth of her son, and also provides
brief bios on Jodie Foster, Calista Flockhart, Diane Keaton, Rosie
O'Donnell, Katie Couric, and Nicole Kidman. As the article proclaims,
quoting Aretha Franklin, in Hollywood, "sisters are doing it
for themselves."

2. The former vice president's attack on Murphy Brown is one of
the most frequently referenced examples in the family values discussion
that reached a pinnacle in 1992. Quayle's concern about the absence
of the father, taken out on the single mother, is indicative of
the backlash, famously characterized by Susan Faludi, against careerwomen
and changing conceptions of women's work. By contrast, the October
2001 issue of Marie Claire included an article, "I Made
my Lifelong Dream Come True," which featured a single mother
by choice. The general context of this article does much to normalize
the SMC phenomenon, even as the title implies that single motherhood
is an almost unattainable goal.

3. As our basic model of narrative, the romance, as Rachel Blau
DuPlessis explains, emerges as a "compensatory social and narrative
practice" at the historical moment when the birth of capitalism
demands a restructuring of the family and division of society into
public and private spheres (2). If we accept that narrative is our
governing epistemology, the very mode of human consciousness, then
any amount of social change or subversion necessitates a new narrative
structure, a new way of envisioning the world. Counternarratves
are the precondition and possibility for imagining politics differently,
for opening a site of ideological struggle. I have discussed this
problematic in a different context in the essay "Women, Utopia,
and Narrative: Toward a Postmodern Feminist Citizenship."

4. As evidenced by the new SMC website, Mattes' own position might
be changing to reflect the changing demographics of the organization.
Certainly Mattes should be lauded for her efforts to publicize and
make acceptable the choice to become an adult single mother. Yet
the rhetoric of "Plan A" continues to dominate discussions
of SMChood both within and surrounding the organization.

6. See, for example, Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Really Are
and Judith Stacey's In the Name of the Family for thoughtful
discussions on the changing realities of contemporary American families.
Stacey, in particular, is careful to point out that it is not the
quantity of parents but the quality of parenting that makes a viable
family unit.

7. My analysis of Oh Baby would not have been possible without
the invaluable assistance of Jennie Van Heuit, who graciously offered
up her video tapes.

8. My deepest gratitude goes to Melissa M. M. Hidalgo for her assistance
with this reading, and for being a friend.

9. As I have written elsewhere, Marge Piercy's novel Woman on
the Edge of Time, for example, disimbricates sex, gender, and
reproduction and creates instead an alternative family structure
based on choice rather than biology.

10. In "Freud's Masterplot," Peter Brooks uses this term
to describe the detours that stand in the way of narrative's proper
reproductive end. While Roof argues that the term "perverse"
doesn't carry negative connotations for Freud, the equation with
homosexuality with the perverse and Freud's own privileging of heterosexuality
makes it difficult to take the term neutrally. And considering the
general tendency to equate SMChood with "Plan B," the
term "perverse" underscores mainstream discomfort with
single maternity.